Beautiful Horror Movies

This set of movies are all built around the idea that they’re a treat for the eyes and ears. Even if you don’t like the plot or characters, you can still enjoy the visuals and sound. They’re all undoubtedly horror, but still beautiful.

• It Follows: A movie full of carefully-crafted shots where every other frame could be a movie poster on its own. The costumes and sets create a world somewhere out of time, where silent films with organ music live side by side with e-readers, and the whole world is green and summery while the cast wears scarves and wool coats. Even background objects, like a lamp or a set of homemade windchimes, are deliberately made to evoke a specific mood. The soundtrack is eerie and discomforting, but serene. The plot is simple and even a bit derivative, but the world itself is immersive.
• Annihilation: The colors are bright, even psychedelic. The Shimmer fills the air with rainbows. Within the altered world live uncannily beautiful creatures, like graceful white deer with flowering antlers, and plants grow in a profusion that would make the Garden of Eden jealous. Even death is beautiful here. The body of a dead man has become a mosaic of lush fungus and plants, growing up an entire wall like a sculpture. A character’s impending death is signaled by the growth of flowers from her body.
• A Wounded Fawn: Shot on 16mm film, the textures and colors of the whole movie are rich. Red is terribly vivid, blues and purples and greens are jewel-like, and light and shadow are more intense. The costumes are precisely chosen, evoking a great deal about each character without needing exposition. Many of the effects are done practically, and the supernatural elements are stronger thanks to real snakes, masks, feathers, and puppets. It’s as disturbing and absurd as the Greek myths on which it’s based.
• Carnival of Souls: Made in black and white in 1962, light and shadow become the primary visual driver of the movie. Many of the sets are dreamlike, and filming choices only reinforce that. Pipe organs, barely-lit abandoned ballrooms, distorted mirrors, empty streets seen from the sky–they take on the sense that the whole movie is a dream. Eyes and faces are brightly lit against pitch-dark backdrops. The sound is eerie: most of the movie is silent, except for the music of a pipe organ. The atmosphere is powerful and uncanny.
• Crimson Peak: A movie that fully captures the aesthetic and power of Gothic horror. From the beautifully bloody designs of the ghosts to the crumbling estate of Crimson Peak itself as it perches on sinking red earth, the world is vivid and violent from the start. Costumes are stunningly lush, focused down to the smallest detail on making the themes of the movie clear. Styles reinforce the way that the estate and its inhabitants have fallen out of time, with the residents wearing styles a decade or more out of fashion. Even nightgowns worn during the climax of the movie are ethereal, turning living women into ghosts.

Food for for thought: how does beauty play with fear in these stories? Do you find that auditory and visual richness enhances the horror, or detracts from it? Would the addition of more senses, if it were possible for you to experience smells, textures, or tastes from the movies, add to this? I think it’s interesting that all of these movies focus on women, and that all but one focus on matters of sexuality and reproduction–what do you think of that? Are there other movies you’d add to this list? Why?

Trapped!

For this list, all of the movies focus on people being trapped in one place. The main plot of the movie takes place in a single room, building, or in one case train. Solid walls, locked doors, and close quarters keep the protagonists of these movies up close and personal with the horror. Sometimes there’s a chance of escape. Sometimes there’s not.

• Saw: The original Saw is a lot less bloody than the name suggests. Two men, strangers to each other, wake up chained in a locked room and have to solve a series of clues in order to escape with their lives. For the central characters, it’s more of a high-stakes escape room than the torture porn the Saw franchise is known for now. Though several other characters do endure more outright violent trials, they all focus on being trapped: within a mask, a maze of barbed wire, or other similar spaces.
• The Ruins: In this movie, a group of foolish college students ignore all the signs of danger and climb to the top of a mysterious, vine-choked pyramid. At the top, they find themselves trapped–both by panicked locals who know what’s about to happen and by the insidious, deadly vines that grow on the pyramid. In this one, what traps the characters isn’t a killer or a monster, but the location itself. The movie is a grueling watch, because there is absolutely no way off the pyramid.
• Train to Busan: During a zombie outbreak, a group of passengers on a high-speed train find themselves trapped with zombies on the inside and the outside. They can’t get off the train because it’s traveling too fast and they can’t stop it, but they can’t stay in the cramped train cars because the zombies are already inside. To move through the train, they have to crawl on luggage racks or fight their way through the horde, and with every door that opens the available space to hide shrinks.
• Grave Encounters: A ghost-hunting team sets up shop in an abandoned asylum, home to a host of ghosts. The team actually locks themselves in, chaining the doors closed to prevent themselves from leaving during a classic ghost hunting lockdown. Surviving the night requires them to make do with the resources they brought inside and nothing more. And the worst part is that they did it to themselves.
• Skinamarink: Two children wake in the middle of the night to find that their father has disappeared, and all of the doors and windows of their house are gone. You can’t get much more trapped than this. It’s even more claustrophobic because the events of the movie are happening in a place that’s supposed to be safe for children, and because unlike adults in a similar situation the children are too young to try to break down the walls or fight back against the force trapping them inside.

Food for thought: How does a constrained environment affect the tension of the movie? Three movies on this list involve children at risk. Does the age of the characters play a role in how tense a story is? How? Two of the movies take place at uncertain times of day, one takes place at night, and two take place in broad daylight. Does this affect the tension of a situation of a trap to you? Would these movies be more tense if there was a greater chance of escape, or would it make them less tense? Are there any movies you’d add to this list? Why?

Horror Movies: Practical Effects Party

This list is one of movies that use primarily or entirely practical effects to make their monsters. CGI is used for enhancement, not as the primary vehicle of creation. In these movies, you could actually reach out and touch whatever fantastical creature is threatening the hapless protagonists. Here, I’ve tried to avoid a lot of the better-known practical effects movies (like Pan’s Labyrinth, The Thing, or Alien) to focus on things you’re less likely to have seen, or that used shoestring budgets to work monstrous miracles.

• The Crawling Hand: A low-budget 1963 horror featuring the murderous antics of a hand that crawls. The hand is done entirely practically. You may get a good giggle out of witnessing the hand’s victims performing as their own killers, or the camera angles that just barely keep the body attached to a hand out of frame as the hand crawls along. Quality these effects are not. But this is a hand you could shake if you wanted.
• The Deadly Spawn: In the heyday of practical monster effects, this low-budget 1983 movie features wonderfully gruesome aliens made almost entirely from the materials at hand. From a full-size, three-headed mechanical puppet to tiny spawn pulled by wires on S-shaped tracks to make them “swim” through a flooded basement, all of the Spawn are physically present on set. It’s a movie that’s rough around the edges, but full of heart. And full of monsters.
• The Void: A better-known and much more recent horror movie, the creative team raised $82,000 on Indiegogo to create the movie’s monsters and effects. And they’re some of the most glorious, grotesque, gory beasts to ever grace the silver screen. This is one of my favorite movies ever, in any genre, just thanks to the creature effects.
• Eyes in the Dark: Intensely, intensely low-budget found footage movie, full of shakycam and melodrama. Foolish, unlikeable college students take a trip into the wilderness and promptly make every cliched, stupid decision that can be made in a horror movie. The saving grace of this movie: the unique take on a classic and usually-not-scary critter, performed by puppets, people in suits, and LED eyes…in the dark.
• Phase IV: A little-known movie from 1974, where a cosmic event causes ants to suddenly become sentient. The plot of scientists trying to understand and stop the ants is pretty standard sci-fi fare, but what makes this movie fun is the ants. Instead of stop-motion, puppets, or CGI, these ants are real. Microscopic photography brings us up close to the ants at an astonishing level of detail. With careful editing of their natural behaviors, the ants are given a sense of individuality and personhood, with heroic self-sacrifice, scenes of mourning, and malicious plotting. Sadly, many ants were killed during the filming of the movie, so you should go in with that knowledge. I was very sad that they died.

Food for thought: When practical effects are used instead of CGI, how does this affect the tone of the movie? Do actors behave differently when working with something physically present beside them? Why would a movie maker choose practical effects over CGI, or vice versa? In movies made before CGI was available or refined, do you think that affected the types of stories a movie could easily tell? Would decent CGI have improved any of the above movies? Do you find, as I do, that even poorly-made practical effects draw you further into a movie–or do they jar you out of it? What other movies would you add to this list?

Stop Motion Horror Movies

On this list, each movie either fully uses or incorporates elements of stop motion. If you’ve never heard of it, this is a technique of moving objects in tiny increments and taking photos at each stage to create a series of individual frames which, when put together, make the object appear to move. It can be as simple as toy dinosaurs moving around or as complex as an entire world. In horror, it can make the impossible possible.

• The Haunted Hotel: Made in 1907, this spooky little comedy comes in at just 4 minutes. It’s the first movie about a haunted house, and also the first to combine live action with stop motion. A live actor interacts with moving handkerchiefs and silverware, which serve him dinner and mischievously torment him. It’s pretty charming.
• Q: The Winged Serpent: A dragon-like creature hatches at the top of the Chrysler Building in New York City, then proceeds to wreak havoc on the city. Q itself is done fully in stop motion. It doesn’t exactly resemble the Aztec god it’s named after–and it’s not entirely clear if it really IS Quetzalcoatl or if it’s just been named that by the bizarre cult worshiping it–but it is a neat beast.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: This is a triumph of stop motion animation and a classic for a reason. It took three years for 120 or more people to animate, using 227 puppets or more, 230 sets with secret doors for animators to use for easy access to sets, and 400 heads for the main character alone. The result is a movie with incredibly fluid animation, characters dancing and singing as “easily” as a living actor might.
• Mad God: A project thirty years in the making by Phil Tippett, a master of stop motion, the movie is entirely made in stop motion. Its plot is…a challenge to follow, if there is a conventional one at all, and it’s more of a tour through a bizarre and horrifying dystopia that plays by alien-but-uncomfortably-familiar rules. Worth a watch just for the atmosphere, or to admire the myriad ways that stop motion can turn fantasy to reality.
• V/H/S 99: The frame for this short horror anthology isn’t a story, exactly. It’s a series of stop motion interludes of toy soldiers fighting toy dinosaurs. The interludes eventually link into one of the segments themselves (The Gawkers), because they’re made by one of the segment’s characters. That itself features a creature once animated by Ray Harryhausen, one of the pioneers of stop motion. It’s a fitting framework for a movie saying goodbye to one century and hello to another, shouting out to the monsters of the past while bringing in monsters of the new millennium.

Food for thought: Why has stop motion endured as a medium for so long? How does it affect monsters made with it? Are there some things it’s better at doing than others? How has stop motion changed from The Haunted Hotel in 1907 to Mad God in 2020? What hasn’t changed in that time? If a movie that uses primarily CGI for its monsters–like A Quiet Place or Annihilation–had used stop motion instead, how would that have affected the movie? Do you think you’d still like it? What movies would you add to this list?

Horror Movies: Landscapes

In all of these movies, the horror is either the landscape itself, or an integral part of the landscape. If it’s an independent threat, it doesn’t just happen to dwell in a particular place, but is intrinsic part of the place.

• The Descent: Here, the landscape is crucial to the first half of the movie as the only threat. Tight spaces, unstable rock, impassable chasms–they’re all natural features that can be found in caves, but they’re also potentially deadly obstacles to the protagonists. In the second half…I can’t really say that the creatures that live in the cave system are integral to the landscape, but you might think differently.
• Blood Glacier: A glacier is literally bleeding. That’s it, that’s the movie. It doesn’t try to pretend to be anything it’s not. The monsters which present an active threat to the characters are all animals which are already parts of the local ecosystem, and are part of the “landscape” themselves. They’re also all practical effects, so bonus points.
• The Ritual: The untouched deep forest presents its own mundane horror to the characters, because getting lost is something any hiker should fear. The being that rules over the forest is much more supernatural. It is, though, an integral part of the forest. Its physical design incorporates elements of animals that would live in this environment (most notably elk). Its sound design does the same thing, incorporating animal calls along with a dose of sounds that uncannily resemble forest sounds: wind in trees, falling stones, and so on. In several notable moments, the being is present on screen but completely camouflaged by how well it fits into the environment of the forest. It can’t even leave the shadows of the trees–it’s part of the forest, and the forest is part of it.
• Sweetheart: Much like many other stories of travelers shipwrecked on islands, the core of this movie is survival in an isolated place with no guarantee of rescue. A solid amount of the movie deals purely with the logistics of a lone survivor trying to make her way on an island with very limited resources. The monster–because there is definitely a monster–isn’t a part of the island, but a part of the ocean.
• Gaia: Taking the idea of mycorrhizal networks to an extreme, Gaia brings us up close and personal with a forest-wide superorganism. The entire landscape is part of a unified consciousness, with even the apparently-independent creatures being extensions of the forest. You can’t get much more “landscape horror” than this.

Some questions for thought: Although all of these use the landscape as the key threat of the story, there’s always a more active threat to pursue the characters. Why? What changes without an active threat? All of these movies, and some other landscape horror movies like Annihilation, use a non-urban setting for their threatening landscape. Why? What does this say about what we consider to be landscapes? If an urban area counts as a landscape, then what kinds of active threats can be considered integral to them? Is Silent Hill a landscape-based horror movie? What about A Nightmare on Elm Street? I’d personally count it as a landscape horror movie, but what would you think about including Candyman on this list?